Drawing Dead (9 page)

Brendan, for all his fragility, was good at getting older men to buy him expensive stuff. Or maybe it was the fragility that attracted them. The picture of manhood with a shattered heart. I could see how a
certain kind of guy would want to take him under his wing, assuage his pain with costly baubles.

I ordered the corned beef and cabbage. Brendan got the house salad, no dressing please.

I gave him the under-the-eyebrows look.

Body fat percentage up a tenth of a point? I said.

I noticed your gut’s starting to hang over your belt. Anybody ever tell you that’s a little disgusting?

No, I said. I think it makes me kind of cuddly.

Jesus. I think I just lost my appetite. When was the last time you went to the gym?

Um, I don’t know, I said. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

This was the pact we’d reached. Without ever saying it, we’d agreed to keep it light. We weren’t going to excavate any bodies, agonize over the shared ugly past. What would it accomplish? Well, maybe a lot. But neither of us was equipped to deal with it. I’d keep an eye on him, older-brother-like. But he did his thing, I did mine. And we tried to survive.

The corned beef was great. Wet and juicy from the cabbage. I wolfed it down. Brendan’s salad looked like mulch. He didn’t touch it. I picked up the check. We went across the street.

The All In was a scungy kind of place. They’d rented out the fourth floor of a walk-up, knocked out all the interior walls and blacked out the windows. Tried to cheer it up with peach-colored walls. The walls just got dirty and made it more depressing, but that didn’t matter. We didn’t go there for the décor. We went to go fishing. And the fishing was good.

We’re sitting down and the dealer’s saying, I’m in Vegas last week. Guy gave a hooker a five-hundred-dollar chip. She gave him three hundred bucks cash back, and performed services, too.

Everybody laughs.

Eddie the Butcher next to me says, I’ll take those odds any day.

Eddie the Butcher was a friendly guy with a red face and a huge mustache. He didn’t murder people for a living. Not that kind of butcher. He chopped up pigs and cows. You could smell it on him. He was a good poker player. Mixed it up. Wouldn’t get pushed around. But the rest of them were wimps. Mice and fish. Fish and mice. Worse than mice. Don’t mice learn from experience? Every hand I played, I opened with a raise. One or two of them would call, every time. Sometimes
three or four. If Eddie called or raised, I’d play my usual game. If he didn’t, I could already put the money in my pocket. The flop would come. If they checked to me, I’d bet. If I went first, I’d bet. If they bet in front of me, I’d raise. If they called, I’d raise on the turn. If it went to the river, I’d raise big. And almost every time, at some point they’d fold. Didn’t matter what cards I had. Or they had. Oh, sure, if one of them flopped a monster, I’d lose some back. But you just can’t give somebody the kind of advantage they were handing out. At some point you have to play back. Re-re-raise. Show you mean business. Eddie knew that. The rest of them never picked it up.

Made you wonder. But not for long. Mostly, you just took their money.

Two thousand bucks in three hours. A good chunk to invest in Brighton Beach.

B
RIGHTON
B
EACH WAS
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY THE WAY IT USED TO BE
. Rows and rows of narrow houses. Life on the stoop. People in the street, doing nothing. A family-owned store on every corner, boxes outside overflowing with odd fruit. Pomegranates, maybe. Sausages, the fruit of Eastern Europe. Languages not English. Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian. A hint of German. But maybe that was the Yiddish.

The game was in a basement. The door was heavy, painted black, windowless. A large brass handle. The old-fashioned kind, with a thumb-push to unlatch it. An old surveillance camera jutted out above it, big and clunky and smiling at us. A surveillance gargoyle. The small painted sign on the door said
Milan Football Club
. On the door frame was a tarnished brass plate. A button.

Butch pulled up in a cab.

This it? he said.

Unless there’s another Milan Football Club on this block, I said.

I pushed the button. Butch scanned the street. Brendan stared at the camera.

I thought you weren’t supposed to look at the camera, I said.

What? he said.

The camera. I thought you weren’t supposed to look at it.

What?

You’re an actor, right?

Used to be.

You’re not supposed to look at the camera.

Oh, he said. Ah. Ha ha.

The door clicked. I pulled at the handle. It didn’t budge. I pulled again. Butch reached around Brendan. Pushed the door. It swung open.

Hey, I said. There’s fire regulations. It’s supposed to push from the inside.

Yeah, said Butch. Good work.

The staircase was impossibly narrow, brick red. The walls had once been painted white. Now, they wore flecks and stains and droppings that spoke of an indeterminate, depressing oldness.

We went down single file.

It didn’t feel safe.

I put my hand on my new old shoulder holster. The Mauser was there. It made me feel better. I thought of thanking Butch.

But that would be wrong. It would just go to his head. Give him an edge. He didn’t need any more edges.

At the bottom of the stairs was another door. Brendan was in front. Butch and I stood on the stairs above him. He negotiated with someone we couldn’t see.

I heard him mention names. Andrei. Anatoly.

That seemed to do it.

The door opened.

The room was dim in a greenish kind of way. The poker table filled most of it. To the right was a curtain, tattered and worn. It only partly screened from view a small kitchen. In the kitchen was a heavyset woman in slippers and a smock that could only have originated in Soviet eastern Europe. On the counter in the kitchen were a number of large aluminum trays brimming with what appeared to be hearty eastern European grub. Brown, tasteless stuff. Lots of dumplings.

Andrei got up as we came in, nodding to Brendan. Anatoly unlatched his bones from his chair, unfolded himself to a standing position, grinning. Brendan! he exclaimed, leaning his mantis body over the table to extend his hand.

Tolya, said Brendan, shaking it.

I wanted to puke.

The rest of the guys were in a hand. We got a few offside glances. It was hard to tell if they knew who we were. It didn’t seem like they cared a whole lot. Which was okay. They paid too much attention, probably they figured you for dead money.

We locked up seats for you, Andrei said. Brendan took the one next to him. Butch and I were at the other end of the table.

Along with the Brothers A., Evgeny was there, as predicted, taking up a lot of space next to Butch. A guy they called Federov, small and wiry with a greasy baseball cap and never said a word. Georgian John. Not the Georgia north of Florida. The other one. Tbilisi, Georgia. Tbilisi John was hairy beyond human imagining. It was hard not to stare. I’d seen hairy knuckles before, but this guy had clumps of fur on his
first
knuckles. And Jimmy Socks, a dark-skinned guy with a goatee and a paunch. He had a friendly air. They called him Jimmy Socks for reasons I never determined. From Bulgaria, he said. Had an electronics business. Or so he said. And Won Ton John.

The dealer was Artie, a scrawny guy with an easy air, tattoos to his earlobes and a t-shirt reading
Bowling for Soup
. I liked Artie. Knew him from the downtown games. Good to see you, he said. I felt the same. It was reassuring to have him there. Made me think maybe the game was legit.

The first hand once we’d sat down, Evgeny and Federov got it on. They raised and re-raised each other until Federov was all in. Evgeny had a few hundred chips left. When they both turned over Jack, Three—one of the worst hands in poker—the joint almost fell apart from the laughing.

Some guys might have thought, great, there’s a lot of dead money in this room. But there wasn’t. It was a shtick. I’d seen it before. Play a big pot with mediocre, or in this case lousy, hands early on. A little show for the new guys. Make them think you’ll raise with anything. Soften the white guys up for later. It’s a standard play. It’s just that these guys did it even more so. And with a lot of noise.

Whether that hand was an act or not, almost everybody at the table was loose-aggressive to the edge of madness. And a whole table of those kinds of guys is very hard to play against. You have to pick your spots. You can’t play way tight. They’ll just take the pot when you fold, and fold whenever you bet. They can’t lose. So you have to mix it up a bit. Or more than a bit. And you have to get lucky some.
The volatility—variance, in the math-geek poker lingo—in that kind of game is huge. You just have to play well enough that your ups are bigger than your downs.

The Smock Lady shuffled in from the back room with a tureen of dumplings and a stack of paper plates. She didn’t ask if anybody wanted any. She just slung the slop on the plates and passed them around. No body declined. I assumed it would be rude if I did. So I balanced the plate on my knee, felt the paper go limp with heat and liquid. After a suitable interval I quietly deposited it under my chair. I was quite sure there were rodents, or other beings, in the vicinity that would enjoy the contribution.

My game started out with a cooler. Federov called my raise from the button. Everybody else folded. I had Ace, King, and a King came on the flop. I was pretty confident—for no reason that I could articulate—that Federov had air. I bet out fairly big. He called, and called my turn bet, too, when a Four came. On the river the club Eight came, putting three clubs on board, and I put on the brakes. Every thing Federov had done screamed flush draw—there weren’t any straight draws out there. So I just put out a blocking bet: a small bet that might look like I was trying to get paid off with a monster, discourage him from firing back at me if he had, say, a small flush, Nine high or something, and was worried that I might have a draw to a bigger one that I’d been semi bluffing with—a semi bluff being a bet or raise you make when you have a draw to a good hand, but nothing made yet.

Federov thought for a long time. He pulled his greasy cap down over his eyes. He didn’t say anything. Gave me time to reflect on how there was something creepy about the guy, tiny and quiet as he was. Couldn’t really put my finger on it. His cap said
Big Kicker Gear
on it, in faded yellow on faded green. I had no idea what it meant.

After what seemed like an hour, Federov shrugged, called, flipped over a pair of Fours for a set. My Kings were dead meat. I lost a big pot right off.

It put me in a bad mood.

We sawed it back and forth for a while, Butch, Brendan and me winning our share of pots, losing a few. Seemed like Butch and Brendan were up a decent amount. I was down a bit. Tbilisi John kept up the flow of vodka. I drank my share. Very uncool to refuse. Worse than saying no to dumplings. Speaking of which, I could feel the mess oozing
around under my feet. There was nothing I could do. Any effort to clean it up would only draw attention to my lack of cultural sensitivity.

The vodka flew down my throat.

The room grew hazy.

I went on a rush.

God love the poker rush. You hit every draw. Your opponents miss theirs. Every big pair you have holds up. You hit sets with your small pairs. It’s a feeling every poker player loves. You can’t get enough of it.

And you don’t. The rush will stop as quickly as it started

So just because the deck is hitting you upside the head, you can’t relax. You have to maximize your profits in the rush. Bruno aside, nobody’s really luckier than anyone else in this game—long term, everybody gets hit the same. Good cards. Bad cards. Which is why the politicians who decry the game as gambling have it all wrong. But that’s another story. Point is, you have to make as much as you can off your good hands, or good luck, and minimize your losses on the bad. That’s what makes a winner.

Before I knew it, I was up sixty-five grand. Most of which was courtesy of Federov. His yellow eyes were sinking deeper into his pointy face. This could be dangerous. I didn’t know the guy. Taking a lot of money off a guy you never saw before could be bad for your health, in Brighton Beach. I needed a break. I wanted to get up and leave, actually. But there’s an unwritten rule: you get up big against someone, you stick around. Give them a chance to get their money back.

Hey, I said to Federov, don’t worry. I’ll be back in a couple. Just need to stretch my legs.

Federov didn’t say a thing. Didn’t even look at me. But Evgeny bailed me out. Hey, he said—actually what he said was more like cxhay, but it’s not spellable in non-Cyrillic characters—let’s we all take a break.

Yeah, yah, da came the chorus.

There was a door in the back. Outside was a cracked concrete slab of a yard, ten feet below street level. It was like a prison exercise pen. Except a whole lot smaller. There were a couple of old picnic benches. Long-dead plants in tin buckets. And about fifteen years’ worth of cigarette butts.

All the Russkies and assorted other lowlifes lit up their black tobacco, chest-burning non-filter working-stiff-from-Leningrad smokes. I tried to be discreet, tapping out my ultralight menthols.

Butch sidled up. I asked him about Federov. He said he didn’t know the guy. But I shouldn’t worry. He read him for a degenerate. But not a dangerous one. We talked about tendencies and tells. Andrei had a habit of rolling his eyes a bit to Anatoly when he had a big hand. Evgeny wasn’t easy to read. He thought any two cards were fabulous, worthy of big laughs and big bets. We knew that already. Maybe he laughed a little harder when he was bluffing. Hard to tell. Federov, forget it. You could plant fire ants in his anus and he still wouldn’t change expression. Excuse, he’d say, his first word of the night, go to the moldy john, blast out his colon with heavy-duty toilet bowl cleaner and steel wool and sit right back down at the game. Maybe his eyes would be a bit narrower. Hard to say.